Out of Mind, Out of Sight

Apr21

Part One of Parker Lancaster's look at the film adaptations of H.G.Wells' 'The Invisible Man'.

H.G.
Wells's “The Invisible Man,” first published in 1897, isn't all that
complicated of a story, especially by science fiction standards. There aren't
many characters or locations, the plot is straightforward, and the science is
mostly inconsequential to an appreciation and understanding of the story. It's
a fantasy and a character study, not just of the titular invisible man, but of
provincial England at the turn of the century (or at least an imagined version
of it). The trouble with it being a character study, of course, is that it can
be difficult for readers to identify with an invisible man.

As
an audience, we have a subconscious urge to put a face and a name to our fears.
And so, with “The Invisible Man,” we have the perfect segue of a story from the
page to the screen. One artificially snowy day in April 1933, a bandaged,
bug-eyed, very warmly dressed, and profusely hot and sweaty British stage actor
named Claude Rains opened a door and stepped onto the set of a British country
inn on the back lot of Universal Studios as a curious fellow named Jack
Griffin, and a pop culture horror icon was born. Wells's “The Invisible Man,”
its famous 1933 film adaptation directed by James Whale and written by R.C.
Sherriff, and the many sequels and copycats on film and television in decades
to follow, demonstrate clearly and forcefully the importance of source material
in adaptations, fidelity to the author's original intent and premise, and how
in the right hands, a memorable story in print can become a lasting and
invaluable part of the cinematic zeitgeist.

Wells's
novella had a long, arduous, and unlikely journey from London bookstores in
1897 to movie screens around the world in October and November of 1933. Before
production began, Wells and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. suffered through a
hand-wringing development hell populated with four different directors, nine
writers, six treatments, and ten different screenplays, none of which were
deemed satisfactory or had any resemblance to the source material. By 1933 it
was already a Hollywood cliché for films to play fast and loose in adapting
fiction for the screen (though not always for the worse; e.g. Universal's own
“Dracula” and “Frankenstein” from '31, the latter also directed by Whale).
Wells was unhappy with all previous attempts to adapt his work on film, and he
wanted to be involved in his own adaptations, so he sold Universal a ten-year
contract to the film rights to “The Invisible Man” for $10,000 (later
re-negotiated to give Universal the film rights to the franchise in
perpetuity), with a clause that he must have guaranteed script approval.

These
failed attempts to adapt “The Invisible Man” make for a worthy addition to the
Book of Might-Have-Been. At one point, “Frankenstein” co-writer Robert Florey
was attached to write and direct the film. Whale himself, experienced as a
director and to a lesser degree as an actor, but not as a writer, wrote a
maudlin, florid early treatment that was painfully rejected by Wells. Preston
Sturges wrote a version as a sweeping romance set amidst the Russian Revolution
(pity the poor actor who would have had to dress even more warmly than
Claude Rains under Universal's studio lights). Remarkably, even John Huston,
the inimitable master of noir and drama, wrote a draft that was rejected. In
the end, it was writer R.C. Sherriff's radical idea to simply tell the story of
the novel that was agreed on by Laemmle and Wells as the best course of action.

Once
the script had been decided on, Whale quickly came back on board to direct, and
the film was cast and a crew assembled in short order. The production was
mostly unremarkable. It went over schedule and over budget, there was a fire
that prematurely destroyed a farmhouse set, and Rains passed out a few times
from heat exhaustion, but none of these things are much out of the ordinary
during a film shoot. What was remarkable, and to a large degree what the film
is remembered and praised for to this day, were the groundbreaking special and
visual effects, many of which were invented for the film and have had a
profound and lasting impact on the film industry. John P. Fulton, then the head
of Universal's “Trick Department,” made the Invisible Man live up to his name
when he invented a travelling matte technique using black velvet image
compositing that predated the blue and green screen digital matte effects that
are now ubiquitous in the industry. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson sold the
illusion by inventing the wirework and practical effects for scenes in which
Griffin was completely invisible. Finally, a team of artists were set to work
with microscopes, fine brushes, and opaque dyes to manually smooth over minute
flaws in the in-camera and optical printing effects for over 64,000 individual
frames of the film negative (nearly 45 minutes of the film's meager runtime).

It's
worth mentioning that while Whale's film is mostly faithful to the narrative,
characters and tone of the novel, there are a few key differences in the
adaptation (and not all of them for the better). The Hays Office's suffocating
moral guidelines and Hollywood studios' maddening insistence on creative
interference in the name of mass appeal may be to blame for some of the film's “quirks.”
An entirely superfluous love story was added to boost the film's feminine bona
fides, and Griffin's lengthy expositional monologue was omitted. Most obvious
of all the differences, especially to fans of Universal's monster movies, is
that the Jack Griffin of the film is exponentially more bloodthirsty than his
literary counterpart. With a total body count of over 130 victims, Jack Griffin
beats his “peers” Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's monster, the mummy
Imhotep, et al, by a country mile (120-year-old spoiler alert: Griffin in the
novel may not be a killer at all; he's merely implicated in one murder and he
later tries and fails to kill a police officer). Somehow, a man who became
invisible turned out to be a bigger threat to humanity than an entire cavalcade
of unholy, flesh-eating, blood-drinking, child-murdering, undead abominations.
Go figure. Griffin's tragic and complicated psyche, personal history, and
descent into madness were all washed away in favor of the simple explanation
that the invisibility formula drove a good man murderously insane. In short,
Universal Pictures turned Claude Rains into a serial killer with a heart of
gold. Sigh.